I’ve taken Amtrak from New York to Boston. It takes about four hours, and is more or less the best the United States has to offer when it comes to passenger rail connecting major population centers. I live in Philadelphia, which along with New York and Boston, built some of the world’s first subway systems very early in the 20th century (trivia answer: even earlier subways were London, which people might guess, and Budapest, which they might not.) Before World War II, Philadelphia had an ambitious plan on paper to build out its subway system. It never happened – today, we have two dirty, old, and unreliable subway lines connecting a fraction of our city, and we are lucky to have what we have compared to most U.S. cities. I also lived in Singapore from 2010-2013. Singapore is not a utopia in every way, despite what their highly effective government propaganda might suggest, but in terms of public infrastructure and particularly transportation infrastructure, it was astonishing at the time. Well, no longer. After visiting Singapore this week for the first time since I left in 2013, it has gone from astonishing to science fiction. They have nearly doubled the size of their system in the time since I left. But what gave me this sense of science fiction is simply a decade of progress in another part of the world, while the United States has been more or less standing still. We are simply not an advanced country in comparison, and the gap is growing.
What do I think Singapore’s secret is? Not some secret high-tech technology. They nurture domestic industry to some extent, while purposely exposing them to competition from foreign competitors. When I was here as an engineering consultant a decade ago, the subway lines under construction were being managed by a German firm and a South Korean firm, which were in turn managed by the state transit agency, the Land Transportation Authority. The other secret is low-cost labor from developing countries. The Singapore-born population is shrinking, so they focus on educating their population for high value-added careers and allow in motivated and willing migrant workers to do the lower-tech stuff. This entails long hours of hard work in the tropical sun, but in Singapore at least labor and environmental standards are pretty reasonable (you can compare their construction site accident data to ours for example and it is very favorable to them, unless you believe there is some cover up. Middle Eastern countries may be a different story however.)
So the moral of the story here is that coddling inefficient domestic U.S. firms and high-cost U.S. labor to build our infrastructure is going to limit what we can accomplish. The winners will be some subset of domestic firms and workers, while the losers are everyone and the entire economy that would benefit from frictionless infrastructure. In a rational world, we might let in efficient foreign firms and low-cost foreign workers, boost our economy, institute a value-added tax, and use the proceeds to education our next generation and anyone in this generation left behind because we brought in the foreign workers. But our politics are clearly not headed in this direction.
Interestingly, the American Society of Civil Engineers has a new video called “Cities of the Future”, which largely showcases Singapore.
